You appear to be typing nonsensical statements that do nothing but pad your posts.
It is clear that you don't like me, and I don't like you, but at the very least, we should show some respect to each other from this point on, starting with me.
You mentioned that the engine should not tessellate the ocean when it is not immediately visible through the view port, meaning to turn water tessellation off when you can't see it. Well, since tessellate object is not the same object as normal object, the engine will need to switch the 2 objects dynamically. Now, the time when the tessellated object switches out will not be the same as when it needs to be switched back in, so either recreate the entire water scene from sketches as soon as a pixel on ocean is shown through the view port or keep the wired frame behind the scene. I am not saying I know what works best, I said we need to test it out.
And theres no ocean behind the ground. Or at least there shouldnt be. Thats the point. Yet theyre culling the buildings but not the ocean.
There is an ocean behind the scene. Think of it as an island on top of the ocean. You believe that not to tessellate water under neath the island will increase performance. My question is, will the time saved by not tessellate the part where it is blocked more than the time required to cut out a hole in the middle of the ocean in the shape which is assembled with all the tessellated objects on top? Logic aside, tests are needed.
As to culling, its purpose is not to break up wired frames, but to eliminate the need to put texture and lighting etc on wired frames that will not be shown on the screen. Water is far complicated than most objects because it reflect light/images. In other words, if you put a mirror in a scene, then the problem with culling exposes as the viewer will detect that the mirror does not reflect objects correctly. Realtime reflection is one of the big thing about tessellated water.
It is a problem because a mesh is being generated with a workload thats never seen
Actually it goes further than that. Those ocean polygons should never be generated regardless of whether theyre tessellated or not.
This equally applies to any other object thats being tessellated, yet we dont see invisible instances of those.
That is not true. Again, the polygon is always there as it represents boundary and connection. Think of it as a waving flag with a pole in front. The wave of the flag should pass through point A to B even though the pole is in between point A and B on the flag. The texture of the part where it is blocked by the pole can be skipped, but not its wired frame. In this case, we are talking about one continuous ocean, one really big flag.
Again, the map data at those points should not reference any ocean data. The engine should be instructed to not draw anything related to the ocean when its rendering those portions of the map.
The engine does skip the drawing of the things that are not shown on the scene, but tessellation occurs before the drawing. As I have explained, the only way to not tessellate things that are blocked is to create one single object. That is, instead of multiple objects and tessellate every one of the individually, construct one big wired frame and tessellate it. That way, tessellation won't occur on things that are blocked, but then how do you put skin on? You lost the reference from skin to wired frame. For example, one blue ball and one yellow ball in front of a wall. After tessellation, the engine will no longer be able to find out where to apply the skin of the blue ball. Look at the wired frame in question, without the art, just the resulting wired frame, will you be able to place the skin correctly if you are the computer?
If I draw a puddle on the ground should I expect an entire map to render invisible water data? Of course not, because the rest of the map doesnt have water.
I am glad that you mentioned those puddle of water on the ground. See for yourself (Caution, once you see this, you can never forget.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kgY1-KjckU
I don't think it need to explain that it really is a corner cutting trick that really doesn't work if realistic is what we are looking for.
Are you familiar with something basic like, say, BSP rendering? Even Doom back in 1993 was capable of not rendering things that werent visible.
You have to understand the chronological order of techniques applied to a scene. The skin of the ocean that got blocked is not applied, the lighting on the ocean that got blocked is not applied. In fact, after culling, everything, including the part of the ocean that is blocked by other objects, is marked as culled and will not be used in more part of the rendering process. For culling to occur, you need to object representation, which is the wired frame. The shadow from object that use pre-tessellated skin will appears to be pixelized, that is because the computer don't see the object like it is shown through the magic view port. Take out the pre-tessellation skin and the shadow is 100% correct. To viewer, it is not so. To make shadow look realistic, tessellation on the fly will do as the shape of the object is defined through run-time. In other word, the computer sees the shape of the object that you see.
Just thing of an island in the middle of the ocean and things will be simpler to see.